This is an extraordinarily clear and insightful account of the blow-back of the growth of the affluent suburbs and of the long-term measures that contributed to the revitalization of urban New York. The clear-eyed refusal to push either standard "liberal" or "conservative" agendas is unusual and enlightening.

I will assign this for my policy and planning students. A must read.
If we only could see the future impacts of Divisive-Americanism on american citizens; perhaps my students will read this and reap a better future.

"We have moved a long way from the vision of the nation that Abraham Lincoln described in his Message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, “To elevate the condition of man . . . To lift artificial weights from all shoulders; To clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; To afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life . . .” “All” is what FDR had in mind when he formulated the New Deal. It is not a word you hear in the public arena—city, county, state, or nation—these days."

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his "vision," blacks in the South were slaves, and Lincoln admitted, over and over again, that he would accept that. FDR failed to end the Depression, and spent his entire second term flailing at invisible, and non-existent, enemies. What paleo-liberals like Mr. Gecan cannot stand, and will not understand, is that life is actually much better than it was in the glory days of American liberalism. Liberalism needs a new vision, and Mr. Gecan obviously has no ideas on that subject.

Sounds like the religious institutions only
give back some of their tax free money to the community when things are desperate.If we are relying on religious help for this situation we will be in deep trouble someday.
By keeping the same system of housing and business renewal we are operating with an infinite attitude in a finite world.We have to evolve to a no growth system before the
Earth is destroyed.

"Only emergency action by labor unions and others saved the city fiscally"

Are you joking? while it is true NY City municipal unions briefly bought short term City bonds when nobody else would, it was those same unions who conspired with the local Democratic machine politicians to trade votes for bloated payrolls. The unions and the pathetic political "leadership" in NY City were one of the primary causes of NY City's financial problems in the first place.

Crediting the Municipal Unions with "Saving" the City is like thanking the mugger who steals your car and wallet but let's you keep your Metrocard for the subway ride home.

It is interesting that in a long article on urban planning and renewal packed with ideas, Mr. Vanneman chooses to target a particular section of the article, hastily slap a label on Mr. Gecan ("paleo-liberal") and then proceed to pursue his personal political agenda. I would call him a troll, but that's trolling.

Very enlightening, and, in spite of what some think, non-ideological in its prescription for community rebirth. What's not expressed is the hearty hooray! felt at the prospect of suburban decline. Suburbs=cars=oil=a dying paradigm for life on this planet. Is it possible to imagine suburban decline and high fuel prices revitalizing cities and public transit systems?

I have met and visited with Mr. Gecan, as well as read his book. This article is truthful, but he misses the prescription:
Regional Equity. This is a major focus of the Gamaliel Foundation, and David Rusk.
Pete da Silva
pete076@hotmail.com

Let's not forget that the resurgence of New NYC came against the the backdrop of the sustained bull market for Wall Street and its professionals over the last 25 years. New York IS the financial industry, as anyone who tries to buy a Manhattan apartment will tell you. Without that tax revenue, the story may have been very different.

Well written, but there is no discernible analysis or argument. You also miss two key points re NYC and Chicago: (1) NYC is a poor example because its revival has disproportionately -- even shamefully -- benefited the rich. The middle class remains priced out of all but the farthest of outer-borough neighborhoods, and the poor are being pushed out due to declining subsidized and rent-controlled housing stock. (2) Chicago's revival has been much more sustainable and far-reaching than you acknowledge -- have you not noticed the huge numbers of middle-class families with school-age children who are opting to stay in the city even as other socioeconomic groups move to DuPage? Look at rises in CPS test scores. Look at the construction/rehab boom in middle-class condo stock that continues even now, as housing markets in the rest of the nation (including DuPage) tank. (3) I also take issue with your implication that the people chopping onions in the tourist trade do not benefit. I am certainly not suggesting it's fair that most of the benefits accrue to the wealthy. But tourism creates jobs that didn't and wouldn't exist before, and helps fill the vacuum left by the flight of manufacturing jobs to China.

So Mr. Gecan was invited to Lombard and saw precisely what he had previously decided he would see. Is this a surprise? He apparently had his manifesto written before he arrived. I live in Lombard, which has always been a mid-range suburb in comparison with others in DuPage. Lombard is a fine place to live. My block is home to white, black, Indian, Albanian, Mexican and Filipino neighbors, and we all get along famously. This in itself is reason for optimism. Houses built in the early 60's continue to be torn down just so that larger houses with bigger kitchens and bathrooms can be built. Major condo developments are filling up, and new businesses are opening up all the time. The Village does a great job in the area of Public Works. We enjoy high levels of parental involvement in the schools. None of this is showing any sign of falling apart, and the idea that it must fall apart because Mr. Gecan's neighborhood did 50 years ago is silly in the extreme. It will take a lot of work and attention to keep DuPage moving in the right direction in an era of economic and societal change, but there is simply no reason to suppose that it can't be done. All the empirical evidence that Mr. Gecan offers points away from the conclusion that DuPage is in crisis. His argument amounts to the idea that DuPage has nowhere to go but down, and certainly there are challenges ahead. But however "young and trendy" the city is, people still come here to raise their kids. It's not Hollywood's or Academia's idea of Suburbia - not by a long shot. It's diverse and imperfect, and small-d democratic, so local government is admittedly messy. I'd never describe Lombard as the garden spot of the western suburbs - Naperville has that title locked up - but we do OK.

The yuppies may move back to the city, but i predict the working classes will keep moving further out.

It's always funny to see such delusional triumphalism vis a vis New York City's turnaround. The progressive leftist thought which drove businesses and the middle class backbone of the city to flee -- and who fought many of the measures which lead to the subsequent reversal of fortunes tooth and nail -- are now taking credit for it.

Thank you James Q. Wilson. Thank you Wall Street. Thank you information revolution. Thank you welfare reform. Thank you community policing. Thank you more sane taxes.

More people are forsaking the suburbs because the cities are now a viable option. Thank heavens for that. But I think I'll projectile vomit if I have to read a victory lap from the left about it when these are the same activist types who used to see artistic merit in graffiti, lament the "suburbanization" of Times Square, bemoan tax incentives for corporations, considered police enforcement with regard to petty street crimes to be fascist, consider black incarceration rates to be racist in spite of the very obvious reality of who commits crime in NY, fought welfare reform to the death, obstructed any efforts to give the heave ho to incompetent teachers, argued that panhandling is freedom of speech, fed the lie that most homeless were families down on their luck rather than substance abusers and the mentally ill, and any number of other lunacies that assured that New York had the vibe of a third world country.

...and a wonderful and robust exchange of views. Will the genuine liberal progressives please take a bow. You're first Pepe!

Interesting article to read from the perspective of Toronto, a city which has undergone tremendous growth since the 1950s but managed to avoid the kind of hollowing out the US midwestern cities like Chicago have experienced. Some of that may have been different social forces present in Canada but also the fact that we never gave up on public transit (and infact built subways in the 50s and 60s) and were able to rotate new immigrants into older downtown neighbourhoods which prevented their decline (even as people moved out to new suburbs). I've never seen an abandoned house in Toronto; the site of blocks of them in Buffalo and Detroit never ceases to amaze me - how bad do things have to get for property to become worthless?

It's bizarre that this essay doesn't mention it. If suburban living is becoming unworkable, it's because the physical resource base that supports it is declining. And it's not a zero sum game between cities and suburbs: the cities will be in trouble too. Much apparently progressive talk here of 'new realities' and the virtue of facing them, but apparently very little understanding of what these realities will be. Depressingly clueless essay.

Interesting article to read from the perspective of Toronto, a city which has undergone tremendous growth since the 1950s but managed to avoid the kind of hollowing out the US midwestern cities like Chicago have experienced. Some of that may have been different social forces present in Canada but also the fact that we never gave up on public transit (and infact built subways in the 50s and 60s) and were able to rotate new immigrants into older downtown neighbourhoods which prevented their decline (even as people moved out to new suburbs). I've never seen an abandoned house in Toronto; the site of blocks of them in Buffalo and Detroit never ceases to amaze me - how bad do things have to get for property to become worthless?

It is so very disappointing to see such over-simplistic explanations destroy what is actually a very interesting situation.

It is also very disappointing to see profound improvements in Chicago turned on their heads to be radical falsehoods. "This extraordinary trope made it possible for a major American city to demolish much of its public housing stock—nearly 18,000 units—and essentially not replace it. Ten years ago, these 18,000 families were promised replacement apartments. To date, fewer than 2,000 have been built, most not affordable to the original renters." Is someone arguing that the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens and Cabrini Green should have been kept? Or that construction on 10 different sites isn't still continuing? Please...

And lastly, the engine behind NYC's change is cash -- their great industry is one no other city has -- Wall Street.

A well written and lucid analysis of the current situation in America's cities and suburbs, but not entirely accurate in the cause-effect and proposed solutions.

Having lived here in Queens NY my whole life, I have to take issue with some of the conclusions specific to NYC and Long Island and would like to offer my observations. To wit:

-- Except for those in rent controlled and stabilized apartments, there is no real middle class in much of Manhattan below the 90s. The real middle class resides in the outer boroughs.

-- No mention was made renewal of older housing by industrious immigrants from eastern Europe, Asia and South America that has displaced the indigineous minorities such as blacks and Puerto Ricans.

-- Over the last 10 years many NYC minorities have migrated to Pennsylvania, Upstate NY, Long Island, and the Southern States because of the phaseout of unlimited welfare benefits and economic competition from more industrious immigrants. This has lessened the economic drain on the working middle class.

-- The person who provided the impetus for turnaround of NYC was Rudy Guliani. David Dinkins and Mario Coumo were part of the problem, not the solution.

-- Prior to Guiliani, 1 out of every 5 NYC residents was on some form of welfare, crime was rampant, NYC was in economic decline, very few movies were being filmed in the City, car theives were given desk appearance tickets instead of being arrested, bums were harrassing female motorists, etc. He single-handedly solved these problems.

-- NYC suburb, Long Island (Nassau and Sulfolk Counties,) has suffered net loss of population because of unchecked growth of Government, political patronage, limited public transportation, and excessive property taxes, which pushed the cost of living through the the roof.

-- Thanks to Guiliani and Blumberg the subways and public transportation are the preferred form of travelling for most people. The NYC parks are clean and well managed. And NYC is now as it was -- a great place to live.

God bless NYC!

Pepe: good points.

Cdn perspective: demographics.

Gecan "This extraordinary trope"- what evidence do you have that it is wrong? Other than, obviously, that anyone who suggests it is an evil racist.... You present none, and in fact much evidence is consistent with it, including the fact that urban decline -along with unassimilated minorities- is moving to the suburbs.

Mike Gecan delivers a passionate and provocative essay rooted in 30+ years of working in the trenches, sleeves rolled up and knuckles scraped. Indeed the tide of the recovery community continues to swell, pouring out over a decades old veil of shame and stigma, lending a broad based experiential voice to the social context of America.

To a person not from Chicago or familiar with it this article may paint a picture that Chicago is all but dead. The city has had a huge growth in the population of middle class people in the last 20-30 years. Areas that were 30 years ago written off as dead have bounced back and immigrants have enhanced many other neighborhoods. Crime is down as in New York and many of the "diverse" people are moving to DuPage because they are being priced out of the city itself. There were more housing starts in the last few years in the city of Chicago itself than in any other municipality in the metropolitian area. I really thought that you were describing another city!

It is all about public safety. When Nyc concentrated on public safety there was a resurgence. Chicago has always had a healthy attitude toward crime.

Detroit, the city I live near has not taken crime seriously. All one need do is tour Detroit to see the devastation and abandonment much of it from the droves that left to safer environs (suburbs).

Economic investment's greatest ally is the reduction in crime

As a fourth generation Manhattanite who recently walked out on a rent-stabilized, thousand square foot apartment to move to Portland, OR, I find this "analysis" damn near absurd. Evidently only the old establishment mainstays created "the new New York". Funny, but every neighborhood *I* know of that is so desirable now, like the East Village, Williamsburg, the Upper West Side, and so on was rejected by his "saviors", who fought to destroy community gardens to build lowrise subsidized housing that would be badly insulated, badly built, and priced out of the market of most residents. But artists, gay people, and others on the margins moved in, got the drug dealers out, cleaned up the buildings, opened stores, created street traffic, and generally did all the heavy lifting any urban policy expert would agree is central to rebuilding a neighborhood. The same is true of Central Park and many other "marquee" New York attractions. Avenue Q did not come from the Catholic church or Big Labor. Nor did Rent or Blue Man Group. And, as pointed out by posts above, it was people working in financial services, media, and the arts whose demand, money, and work drove most of it. The Dursts didn't do their multibillion dollar work to restructure Times Square starting in the sixties because of government funding; quite the contrary. It took a long time indeed but I assure you that the now Guiliani-branded project was well on the way long before he came on the scene.

As for Guiliani, How anybody still endorses him with a straight face is beyond me. Over two hundred cities across America saw decreases in street crime. Rudy was in one. Rebuilding downtowns was doing just fine, thank you very much, in cities from Sacramento to Burlington to San Antonio when "the Shark" was just one more headline-grabbing prosecutor. Want to know about his role in NY? Ask a firefighter.

"Increased housing stock"? Don't make me laugh. In the last two years before I walked out on my increasingly decrepit apartment the rent went up almost twenty percent, as did the rent on all the other thousands of units under the same legislation. By the time I left, much of the three block long area my building was in had been reduced to rubble for condos. All across New York rent stabilized and controlled housing has been deregulated, condoized, or simply condemned and torn down. Having a real estate executive as governor hasn't helped. Many thousands of middle class families and seniors have been forced out.

I lived on the edge of Washington Heights for thirty years and I saw a hell of a lot of hard work by people like Symphony Space that Mr. Gecan's chuches and unions dismissed with loathing and contempt. Hard work that brought back streets his people still ignore. All while the working class and middle class food and clothing stores all got priced out and replaced with high-priced boutiques. Did the groups he mentioned build housing? Well, yeah, but largely because of squatter-friendly laws the Koch administration passed that gave anybody who did enough documented sweat equity on such abandoned properties ownership of their building. Laws that more recent mayors have reversed.

Buildings were being rehabbed, as were community resources like ABC No Rio, Charas, and Dos Blacos, in record numbers with no help from and frequently with opposition of Mr. Gecan's friends. And these "radical" rehabbers were frequently doing all they could to put in greenroof and solar and gardens and all the other kinds of amenities and improvements that Mr. Gecan's friends are only now discovering to be important. Twenty to thirty years later. Umbrella House may not be his cup of tea but their way is sustainable, practical, scalable, community-oriented, and cheap.

I've seen the shoddy, mock suburban or cement block under brick veneer crap Mr. Gecan's friends have put in, inside and out. I've seen the adventurous, sometimes beautiful, reliably loved projects by the individuals and groups Mr. Gecan ignores. I know which I, and, I suspect, history, favor.

I happen to live in an "exurb" area. We used to live in an inner ring suburb but then it got too "dark." It may offend your liberal sensitivities to hear this, but too bad.

After the community became about 15% black, the quality of life went down. The houses were not maintained, the kids started complaining about harassment at school, and crime rates did go up. We never had any sort of violence in the area before this but, after some time, we experienced a shooting.

These were the blacks that were supposed to be "just like us." They had escaped the ghetto to live in a better place and at first, I totally respected that.

But through that experience, I learned that I will never live near large numbers of blacks ever again. I even picked up another job in order to live where I do. If I have to work four jobs to live away from them I'll do whatever it takes.

I spent 28 years of my life being "tolerant." After 3 years in a "diverse" area, the "tolerance" was slapped out of me.

On a side note: After my experience in the soon to be ghetto, I did a lot of research on segregation. My research has led me to the conclusion that the people who advocated integration were connected to the suburban developers. I'm doing research on this subject and plan on writing a book. No one scored better than the developers from the end of segregation. They knew the end of segregation would lead to big time movement. Just something to think about....

Whites should live alone without other races.

I read this article following the one in Atlantic about "The Next Slum?" which suggested the exurbs are declining while the inner cities are thriving/gentrifying. I would also recommend Alex von Hoffmann's "House by House Block by Block" which traces renewal in a variety of cities.

While I disagree about whether Chicago gets the Olympics (Brazil is the only real competition) and I think the long-winded ex-Manhattanite has some points about how New York got rehabbed, I think Gecan did an excellent job of both avoiding the analysis-deprived ideological positions both left and right and of charting how governments get into debt: by depending on growth.

The pattern in DuPage is clear - reliance on residential taxes works for about 40 years because the continued growth shields existing businesses and residents from the real costs of shared services. Once land runs out, the Bronx starts burning. The Atlantic article suggested that the next step for many of the areas is to get denser - just as urban areas did by chopping homes into 2-flats or 3-flats or more. I live in a mature suburb with rapid transit (34% black by the way, and richer and nicer than it was when it was 12% black) where building densities have increased in the last 15 years although population is still lower than the 1970s but that is a function of how much space we now use per individual and smaller families. Like Chicago and New York, our town filled its borders, unable to expand after about 1960. This led to decline, but then our town, like Chicago and New York, figured out a new pattern of growth that would allow it to thrive.

Turning a farm field into a subdivision or home center is the jellyfish of economic development - as primitive and dumb as you can get. DuPage County is now faced with evolving, as places like New York did before, and become a creature that performs economically without dumb development. This evolution is not an even process and local and county governments are often the last to acquire a backbone. My lovely diverse town has real estate taxes that consume a fifth of my income, (that number roughly corresponds to what I would spend on private schools in the city), and the county is nearly broke. But like Manhattan, I don't need a car where I live and the real wild card in this discussion is automobile subsidies. All of these places, especially DuPage, were built in a 40-year window of low gas prices and massive federal automotive subsidies (especially roads) that won't return. DuPage is already angling for tons of new public transit, which they will need if they alter the business-subsidy tax structure, and given how things are going, they will.

"long-winded ex-Manhattanite"?

Ouch. And sorry. I'm afraid that brevity is rarely one of my strong points.

Why is it that the sins and failures of the public sector are always blamed on insufficient funding and encroaching privatization? The residents of the Chicago at its peak in which Mr. Gecan grew up during the 1950's, paid a state sales tax of 4% and no state or local income tax. Today the residents of a hollowed out Chicago pay a state/city sales tax of 9% and a 3% state income tax on top of crippling property taxes. In return for being gouged, they get illusory city services and a public school system that is unable to produce functionally literate graduates for the real world. The bloated police force is more an instrument of further revenue enhancement through traffic and parking citations than a real crime fighting machine.

Mr. Gecan neglects to mention that Chicago has experienced an unprecedented citywide building boom that has touched even previously blighted areas. This boom is the result of private initiative and not anything that the politicians and planners have done other than to stand aside.

The real problem here and a drag on the local economy is the greedy, gluttonous and unaccountable public sector that collects its funding at gun point through every imaginable tax, fee and fine and then, predictably, fails to deliver the promised goods. So if there truly is a move toward privatization, then such a phenomenon should be celebrated. The people with guns have failed miserably at all their stated civic goals except for the most important unstated one which is to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of everyone else. But then why shouldn't they? The city run public school monopoly has conveniently neglected to teach its charges that historically that is what people with guns, AKA the government, always do.

It's time for the failed, corrupt public sector to be cast onto the trash heap of history. The use of force is clearly the wrong social organizing tool. Freedom of choice, freedom of association, voluntarism and spontaneous social interactions are the way to go. That is what once built America. It's time for the working people of Chicago and other cities to keep their money and control their destiny without the interference of self serving politicians, bureaucrats and planners pining for some fantasy public life.

"Why is it that the sins and failures of the public sector are always blamed on insufficient funding and encroaching privatization? The residents of the Chicago at its peak in which Mr. Gecan grew up during the 1950's, paid a state sales tax of 4% and no state or local income tax. Today the residents of a hollowed out Chicago pay a state/city sales tax of 9% and a 3% state income tax on top of crippling property taxes."

The federal income tax topped out at around 80% during the Eisenhower era. Taxes (and public revenues) are lower now than ever, which is why public education and mass transit is crumbling.

The current condition of cities is the predictable and inevitable consequence of the major government policies adopted after WW II, that favored suburbs at the expense of cities, by encouraging and subsidizing families to leave cities and move to the suburbs where life was (and still is) more agreeable and more lucrative -- i.e., the purchase of a suburban family home turned out to be a spectacular investment for the middle class. Add to that the urban pathologies that followed -- urban riots, the rise in crime (particularly in the 1970s), the catastropic decline in the safety and quality of urban public schools, the rise of the urban underclass and of the homeless roaming city streets, and redevelopment which quickly became an engine of destruction of low and moderate cost urban housing, and you get exactly what we got: emptying cities and growing suburbs. Ideas and policy coices have consequences.

The things that destroyed Chicago and other urban centers were social welfare programs and high taxes that detroyed the incentive to work. Also, unions that lined their pockets at the expense of future investment. Only a nincompoop would have left the conveniences of the urban neighborhood for the high rents and expenses of the suburbs unless he/she were driven out. With its disasterous social welfare programs, the government succeeded in moving virtually the entire middle class to the suburbs. As the welfare programs have been eliminated, the cities are reviving and criminals are being prosecuted and hunted down by the police. However, the stupid socialists are at it again. Raising taxes and forcing people to flee ever farther form the cities and even moving out of state. The government bureaucracies are again loading up on patronage and raping the taxpayers through entities like the public schools. They are intent on destroying the Reagan legacy. Each generation has to learn the hard way.

Interesting read from someone who obviously knows quite a bit about both places and their dynamics. Why can't we just give the man some credit and agree to disagree civilly? Many of the comments seem to reflect his warning about conflicts over nothing. The commenters all bring their particular shade of rose-colored glasses to the party, including the old he-is-just-a-liberal-and-cannot-be-trusted canard. Is this reflective of the current decline nationwide? Has the current flavor of conservatism improved the commons?

Regardless of one's political opinion, the fact is that it takes smarts and consistent action, including money, over a sustained period of time to bring a city back to economic health. It doesn't happen by itself. Capitalism sucks the marrow from that which it feeds upon, and it does not reward the commons. It rewards private individuals and institutions, and if they are not forced to contribute back (they used to do it willingly, but even that was haphazard) to the commons, then we all suffer in the end. Pretty simple to me.